swombat.com

daily articles for founders

Daniel is the cofounder and MD of GrantTree, previously CTO/cofounder of Woobius and Vocalix, a full-time entrepreneur since 2007, and founder of swombat.com. I previously worked at Accenture and studied Physics at the University of Oxford.

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Swombat.com started off as an individual effort, but it's now becoming the work of a team (to be announced).

Together, on swombat.com, we summarise and comment on the best articles for founders each day, as well as occasionally post our own thoughts and advice, so you can read the most useful articles while focusing on building your own startup.

Most people will swiftly agree with most of the high values of humankind: freedom, happiness, truth, respect, justice, equality, prudence, compassion, courage, modesty, patience, moderation, harmony, industry and so on; but ask them which is the most important and prevailing. You will suddenly find in the pattern the striking differences that tell fascists apart from communists and religious fanatics from tolerant free thinkers.

Bad people have no problem with good values. Irreconcilable opposites are made from the same handful of values representing goodness. It is the weight of each that differs.

The same is true for entrepreneurial values. Everyone but the most psychopathic entrepreneur will agree that a business should treat its employees well, shouldn't waste money, should create value, should generate returns for its shareholders, shouldn't kill people or make them ill, and so on.

And, more specifically in the tech startup world, a great many entrepreneurs will agree that startups should hire the best people they can, should iterate, should keep an eye on relevant metrics, should have automated test suites, should have automated deployments, should have backups of valuable user data, should be running on secure, well-administered servers, and so on. For B2B startups, everyone agrees that making sales, creating a good brand and building strong customer relationships are good things.

At the very least in public, very few entrepreneur will disagree with those values. But, as with the more generic human values, there is a world of difference in how each entrepreneur orders those values. Are backups more important than automated tests? Is saving money more important than implementing good metrics measurements? Is it ok to treat your employees harshly in the name of shareholder returns?

If you're going to work in someone else's business, it is wise to try and determine how they have ordered their values before doing so - this is why interviewing with people who work there already can be so important for the job seeker.

And, similarly, for yourself! What sort of entrepreneur are you (or will you be when you start your own business)?

To be aware of your values and to examine their worth with your own mind is yet another subtle source of freedom. Keep Nietzsche's hammer at hand to gently tap on each value and to judge the sound. Depending on the place where they are hung, some of those bells may give an empty ding of hypocrisy. We tend to forget that values are man-made axioms agreed as beneficial. There is nothing God-given about them. You do have a right to examine them freely - in your head - to chose your own choices. This is not theory: your own chime, your arrangement of personal values chants who you are.